Facebook was among big-name customers of Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing operations hit by a major, global outage overnight Sunday. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
Scores of the websites and apps, including Facebook, Disney+ and Reddit were hit by a global outage overnight caused by an “operational issue” at U.S. cloud services provider Amazon Web Services.
At the peak of the incident, early Monday, AWS reported more than 70 of its own services were impacted before saying it had resolved the issue, although it warned of sluggishness as systems worked overtime to catch up.
“Some requests may be throttled while we work toward full resolution,” it said, urging customers to utilize the “clear cache” option in the settings of their browser if problems with errors persisted.
The sites of Lyft, The New York Times, Snapchat, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T were affected, according to complaints reported by customers. Cryptocurrency firm Coinbase also reported problems.
Over in Britain, Gov.uk and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, the two main portals of the U.K. government, said they had been affected.
“We are aware of an incident affecting Amazon Web Services, and several online services which rely on their infrastructure. Through our established incident response arrangements, we are in contact with the company, who are working to restore services as quickly as possible,” said a government spokesman.
Lloyds Bank and subsidiary, Halifax, two of the country’s largest banks, and National Rail also experienced problems.
AWS has a 30% global share — 4 million customers — of cloud computing, a rapidly expanding sector that keeps businesses, governments and other organizations online with their customers via apps or websites.
The outage comes 15 months after a global IT outage in July 2024 that crashed millions of computers used by 911 centers, airlines, financial institutions, airlines and media around the world, due to an issue with a third-party security update for Microsoft Windows systems.
The auto download from Texas-based CrowdStrike cybersecurity for its Falcon software caused computers to hang after they were able to fully restart after the update.
